How I Made: Low Poly

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How I Made, by Mark White

April 4, 2016

How did Wojtek Fus create Low Poly?

1. Have a plan

This is always my first step. I am thinking about my portrait as I would think about designing a logo. I want something bold, unique and I want it to communicate a certain mood. In this case I am using as many straights as possible. I don’t care where the lines end, I will use these intersections to my advantage in the later stages, when I will be building shapes on top of them.

2. Create the shapes

Then I extract the shapes from the lines, picking interesting angles that will give the artwork an energetic composition.

3. Use brushes

Locking the transparency of the shapes I created enables me to work inside of them with a soft brush, getting the form somewhat right. I use different blending modes on the brush (Multiply, overlay, Color Dodge, soft Light) to get nice colour richness.

4. Start rendering

Now, I go in and start to render the features like eyes, nose and mouth with just a couple of brushes. It’s not really that important which brush you will use, you can do it perfectly fine with just a standard Round brush.

5. Select areas to paint

Making a selection around the area you’re painting means that you can keep the precise low-poly shapes but combine them with the brush strokes and colour effects you get from rendering with brushes.

6. Make it low poly

Then I paint on top, grabbing the Polygonal Lasso tool, creating triangular shapes in strategic places, filling them in with a flat colour that I pick from underneath.

7. Create custom shapes

To quickly create Custom Shapes that can be used more than once, make a selection with the Pen tool, Right-click and choose Define Custom Shape – it will now be in the Shape dropdown and can be re-used again and again.

8. Finishing touches

In this step you can see that I am building on top of what I have established before. In the later stages of your painting it’s really easy to get distracted by the details, so make sure you are staying focused! I have applied some postproduction with a Color Lookup adjustment layer with the preset Crisp Winter.